Brian wrote:
>And therein lies the rub. Insects, like people, are more susceptible to disease when large numbers are crammed into one area.

Perhaps, but let me play devil's advocate for a moment:

1.  More bees crammed into one hive is not usually more susceptible to disease, in fact usually the opposite.  Strong hives clean up many diseases like chalkbrood, sacbrood and EFB better than weaker less densely populated hives.

2.  More hives crammed into one area may also not be that bad (depending on the resources they are competing for).  Geoff Manning noted that Ben Oldroyd found in Australia that feral hives clustered in some areas.  Ben also speculates in his book "Asian Honey Bees" on the possible advantages for the dense aggregations of Apis dorsata colonies in some bee trees (some trees can have 20 or 30 large colonies).  He dismisses as unlikely scarcity of suitable nest trees.  He also thinks the advantages of dense concentration of drones for mating are not that great.  But, there are advantages for nest defense in aggregation.  Aggregation also reduces the probability that an individual colony will be attacked or disturbed by a predator.  (And so we get the large collections of animals:  herds of caribou, wildebeest, bison, gigantic flocks of birds, huge schools of fish...)

3.  While the advantages of aggregation for apis dorsata do not seem to be great (and the subspecies breviligula I worked with in the Philippines last winter does NOT aggregate), the fact that they DO aggregate seems to indicate that the disadvantages of aggregation are also not that great.

4.  In almonds, what might be problematic is not that large numbers are crammed into one area, but that these large numbers are coming from many different parts of the US and bringing with them most strains of most diseases and pests.  When I was in Chile I saw Juanse operating healthy yards of 100 hives (which I can't do), and even 200 in at least one spot.  I visited another beekeeper in the Reloncavi fjord who had 400 hives in his home (and only) yard and harvested 30 kg. per hive the year before.  A lot depends on the resource availability.

Brian also quoted:
"Any time you try to rear anything in a bulk fashion, you run into problems," said Diana Sammataro, a research scientist at the USDA's Carl Hayden Bee Research Center in Tucson. "It's like with cows. When you put a bunch of them together, you have to put them on antibiotics because they aren't meant to live like that."

She seems to have chosen a poor example.  While cows are not meant to live in feedlots, they ARE meant to live together.  They are a herd animal, and sometimes as I noted above herds can be very dense, but the advantages can be worth it.

Stan

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